Origin

The words gender and engender (Middle English) go back via Old French to Latin genus ‘birth, family, nation’, a word that was reborrowed in the early 17th century for scientific classification, although it had been in use 50 years earlier in logic. In modern French the ‘d’ was lost to produce genre, a word reborrowed in the early 19th century. Generation (Middle English), generate (early 16th century), engender (Middle English), generosity (Late Middle English), genial (mid 16th century), and degenerate (Late Middle English) are all from the same source.